“Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence... Lee-Anne... but the wombat is not star quality.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“This most beautiful system [The Universe] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”
― Isaac Newton, quote from The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
“perhaps Dawood’s status as a fugitive and an outlaw beyond the reach of the Indian legal system suits many back home in India. Empires built with his money would collapse and many skeletons would tumble out of the closet if he was ever brought back home. The powers that be would rather have Dawood Ibrahim stuck in Pakistan. And so the cult of Dawood will be perpetuated.”
― S. Hussain Zaidi, quote from Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia
“The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”
― Austin Kleon, quote from Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
“You smell salty," he says. "Like the ocean." He leans closer to me and licks up the side of my face. "You taste salty too. Maybe I should grab a bottle of tequila and we should have some fun." He moves his eyebrows up and down. "What do you say? We'll do some shots and I'll lick you all over.”
― Jillian Dodd, quote from Stalk Me
“Here’s the twist to your story, Charlie. You ready for it?" he growled and nipped at my lower lip. "Breathe me in deep. Hold your breath. I will make you fall in love with me again. Because I sure as shit didn’t think I’d ever see you again, and I sure as shit didn’t think I could fall in love with you again, but I did." His hands gripped me tighter. "Like I was falling from a cliff, Charlie. Then...then…I realized when I hit the ground; I’ve been in love with you this whole time. It never stopped. I’ll never stop. I will never stop, and I will never give up on you." His voice lowered, “It was you from the beginning, the minute you taped that skull and crossbones to your window wearing those baggy jeans, that Nirvana T-shirt, and those God-awful chucks, you were my horizon. Everything I could ever see.”
― Christine Zolendz, quote from Here's to Falling
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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